Buenaventura Colombia

Two summers ago, drug gangs, leftist rebels and right-wing militias traded mortar and machine-gun fire daily as they vied for control of this steamy port city. Teens were paid $200 a month -- a king's ransom in this impoverished community -- to act as lookouts for narcos. Armed groups fought it out in the neighborhoods and trash-strewn inlets from which 60-foot speedboats departed for Central America and Mexico with illicit drug loads. With an average of three killings a day, Buenaventura's homicide rate was among the highest on the planet.

Two summers ago, drug gangs, leftist rebels and right-wing militias traded mortar and machine-gun fire daily as they vied for control of this steamy port city. Teens were paid $200 a month -- a king's ransom in this impoverished community -- to act as lookouts for narcos. Armed groups fought it out in the neighborhoods and trash-strewn inlets from which 60-foot speedboats departed for Central America and Mexico with illicit drug loads. With an average of three killings a day, Buenaventura's homicide rate was among the highest on the planet.

About 150 dancing couples from across Europe stopped in mid-twirl or -shimmy, dropped their jaws and nailed their eyes on a giant video screen. That's how salsa impresario Albert Torres recalls the scene at the Scandinavian Salsa Congress in Goteberg, Sweden, when the participants first caught sight of the fleet-footed style of salsa dancing practiced in Cali, Colombia -- 18 calenos pumping their legs as if they had solved the problem of perpetual motion.

The capture was worthy of an action thriller: elite Mexican troops rappelling from a helicopter onto the deck of a mysterious submarine. The 33-foot vessel turned out to be crammed with parcels apparently containing cocaine, possibly tons of it. The disheveled crew of four had emerged in stocking feet and baggy shorts, claiming to have shipped out from Colombia a week earlier under threat of death.